Â
“It's a young family's world at Co-op City, the new town being created in N.Y. City," read a promotional poster in the 1960s. "Family-sized apartments at a price you can afford. It's perfect for the family with children… the wide open spaces of a 300-acre residential park (200 city blocks). And not a single interior traffic road. You'll know the youngsters are safe."
More than three decades later, few youngsters are playing in the Greenway, the largest park at the Bronx cooperative housing complex, which has become what social service providers call a "naturally occurring retirement community." Indeed, with more than 8,000 residents over the age of 65, Co-op City is considered the largest such retirement community in the nation. But that is not why children no longer play in its largest park. It is because the Greenway is filled with rows of cars; the park has been turned into a parking lot. It was paved over to provide emergency parking after one of Co-op City's parking garages collapsed and engineers ordered five more closed immediately.
Many other maintenance problems, along with an enormous mortgage debt, have caused Co-op City to go from a symbol of the promise and success of affordable housing in New York to a sign of its woes. While Co-op City crumbles, Mitchell-Lama, the state-sponsored middle class housing program that created it and hundreds of other developments, is eroding in other ways. The city is planning new affordable housing initiatives, but critics say that new buildings will not be able to make up for what is being lost.
"We are in a hemorrhage kind of situation," said Michael McKee, associate director of the New York State Tenants & Neighbors Coalition. "We are never going to build as much affordable housing as we are going to lose."
Co-op City is the largest complex built under the state's Mitchell-Lama program, which ran from 1955 to 1978 and was intended to encourage developers to build housing for the middle class. The state gave developers tax exemptions and low-interest mortgages in exchange for what they hoped would be the public good of affordable housing. At Mitchell-Lama buildings the government has control over rents and co-op prices, and developers have to charge prices that middle class New Yorkers can afford.
The program, named for New York State Senator McNeil Mitchell and State Assemblyman Alfred Lama, is often championed by city planners and housing advocates. "From the point of view of providing affordable, moderately priced housing, it is a smashing success. Can you imagine what the city would be like without the Mitchell-Lama program? For people who work for city government, low to middle income people, this has been an incredible success," said Tom Angotti, a professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College. "I think we should ask ourselves, why isn't Mitchell-Lama being repeated?"
Others say the reason is clear: it wound up costing taxpayers a great deal more money than anybody had imagined. "The Mitchell-Lama program was supposed to be one in which there were minimal subsidies from state or city funds," said Dick Netzer, professor emeritus of Economics and Public Administration at NYU's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. "The main reason that the program ended was that it actually required very large subsidies, for some (but not all) projects." The city had tried to finance some of these subsidies by a kind of short-term bonds, Netzer said, which were to be paid off by the mortgage payments on the Mitchell-Lama buildings, but rising interest rates increased the mortgage payments and "project after project defaulted on the required payments. They simply refused to pay what was required." By 1975, there were some $1.8 billion in such bonds, virtually all defaulted. Taxpayers in effect footed some of the resulting bill, and for years afterward, large subsidies continued on some Mitchell-Lama projects, including Co-op City. Meanwhile, Netzer also noted, "there are widespread violations of the income limits set in the Mitchell-Lama law." Thus, despite the "splendid history" of some Mitchell-Lama projects, Netzer concluded, given the exorbitant cost to taxpayers, "it is hard to make much of a case for a new Mitchell-Lama program."
The first of Co-op City's 35 buildings went up in 1968 on the site of an American history theme park called Freedomland USA. The project was designed with its own educational park and other features to keep families from leaving the city for the suburbs, and the price to buy a one-bedroom apartment was just $1,350. So many middle class families left their neighborhoods in the South Bronx to move to the new complex that Co-op City is often said to have signaled the decline of the Grand Concourse.
A one-bedroom apartment in Co-op City now sells for under $6,000, and none of the complex's apartments can be sold to people whose household income is under $18,000 or over $100,000 a year. But while the city-within-a-city continues to be one of the few places where working class New Yorkers can afford to be homeowners, its mortgage debt with the state has climbed to $220 million. And it is falling apart.
Every single window needs to be replaced in each of Co-op City's 35 high-rise towers. Each building's cement terraces are crumbling -- wooden fences were installed to protect walkers-by from falling chunks of cement. The elevators need to be overhauled, the brick facades need work and the roofs are in disrepair. The complex's backup generator, which should have kicked in to keep Co-op City running during August's blackout, is broken.
Co-op City's many needed repairs won't be made until the cooperative refinances its debt with the state and gets the money to pay for them. Co-op City stopped making mortgage interest payments in July, saying it simply didn't have the money. Meanwhile, in August the complex's maintenance staff threatened to go on strike, complaining that they are underpaid.
Construction problems have plagued the complex from the beginning, according to Steve Gold, director of residential sales for Riverbay Corporation, which runs the complex. Gas and sewer lines have broken as the land Co-op City was built on settles. The original construction work, overseen by the State Housing Finance Agency, was done poorly, and with substandard materials. And so Co-op City's board has long been arguing with state officials over who should pay for the repairs.
The two sides are in the middle of negotiating a big refinancing package, and say they hope to come to an agreement by the end of the year. As they debate, Co-op City residents worry about when repairs will be made, and about the future of their apartments. Ora Frank moved to her six-room Coop City apartment, with a terrace, in 1971. "We were real pioneers," she said. "But I don't think it ended up the way it started out to be… [These issues] always keep your anxiety up, and a lot of the people who used to fight for things are dead."
And as part of the refinancing, Co-op City will raise maintenance charges, which right now range from $450 to $1,050 a month. "As much as nobody wants to pay more, this will be the first increase since July 1995 and it is going to result in people getting new roofs and elevators," said Gold. "I think that's realistic. I don't believe it is going to be [raised by] a staggering amount."
While Co-op City struggles with debt and repairs, other Mitchell-Lama buildings are having troubles of their own. At the converted Mason Mints Candy factory at 20 Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights, all of the tenants are being evicted. They started moving out during the past few weeks. When they are gone, the buildings' new tenants, instead of paying the $600 to $1,000 per apartment that rent cost under the Mitchell-Lama program, will pay amounts similar to the rest of Brooklyn Heights, where an average one-bedroom apartment costs $2,000 a month.
The building's owners are able to do this by taking advantage of a provision in the 1955 Mitchell-Lama bill that says that 20 years after developers receive tax breaks and low interest mortgages to construct a building, they can withdraw from the program by taking financial steps like repaying their mortgages.
The stipulation was included in the bill because lawmakers believed that developers would not have enough incentive to build Mitchell-Lama buildings if they did not have the option to eventually leave the program. Since the last Mitchell-Lama building was finished in 1978, all of the buildings are now eligible to leave.
What happens to tenants after a building leaves Mitchell-Lama depends on when it was built. If the building was finished before January 1, 1974, then all of the apartments will become rent stabilized, and can only increase by the rates set by the city's Rent Guidelines Board. If the building was finished after that date, like the converted Mason Mints Candy factory, owners can charge market rates and force long-term tenants to leave. Legislators and affordable housing advocates have tried unsuccessfully to pass a new law that would make all Mitchell Lama buildings that leave the program become rent stabilized. At 20 Henry Street, the tenants filed a lawsuit seeking to keep their apartments rent-stabilized after the building left Mitchell-Lama. They lost, but decided to appeal.
So far, 52 of the 269 Mitchell-Lama projects built in New York State have left the program, most in the city, according to the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal. (Some Mitchell-Lama buildings are supervised by that state agency, others by the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development.) Fourteen other projects in New York City have buyouts pending. In some former Mitchell-Lama buildings, like the Ruppert Yorkville Towers on the Upper East Side, tenants have won settlements to be able to purchase their apartments at a reduced rate. And at Waterside Plaza on the East River, tenants eventually came to an agreement with their landlord to keep their rents from being raised to market levels after the city agreed to phase in the landlord's taxes over the next 20 years.
Many housing advocates cheered the Waterside Plaza agreement. But some say that New Yorkers' tax dollars should not pay for keeping a small number of people in $700-a-month midtown apartments. When the agreement between Waterside's tenants and owner was announced in 2001, the New York Post wrote, "Those tax breaks indirectly come out of everyone else's pockets… New York's hugely 'generous' housing policy - be it tax abatements, subsidies, public housing or rent-regulation - discourages tenants from moving out and making apartments available. It also stokes demand - when demand hardly needs stoking."
Last December, Mayor Michael Bloomberg outlined a plan to try to meet New York City's great demand for housing. The plan would build or renovate 65,000 homes during the next five years. And it includes housing for middle class New Yorkers. According to the Independent Budget Office, about half of the new housing will be for New Yorkers who make between $88,000 and $157,000 a year. Sixteen percent will be for those who make under $50,000 a year.
The mayor's housing initiative is the biggest since Mayor Ed Koch's day. But City Councilmember Gail Brewer responded to the plan by saying that the city should work to preserve Mitchell-Lama buildings and more closely copy the 1955 program. "Here we are as a city trying to provide affordable housing and it already exists. I would opt for more Mitchell-Lamas, if I had my druthers," she told Real Estate Weekly.
McKee, from the New York State Tenants & Neighbors Coalition, pointed out that through the Mitchell-Lama program, 165,000 homes were built statewide, over 25 years. "And even that was not nearly enough to solve the imbalance between supply and demand," he said, and added that the demand for middle class housing will grow as more Mitchell-Lama buildings go market rate.
There has even been talk of Co-op City leaving Mitchell-Lama. Some Co-op City board members have argued that instead of renegotiating its mortgage with the state, the complex should leave the Mitchell-Lama program and become a private co-op. This would allow co-op shareholders to sell their apartments for market price. The complex's regulations would make a portion of each shareholder's profit go to Riverbay to use towards paying off the mortgage debt - and making all of the needed repairs.
Last April, Co-op City residents voted to allow the Riverbay Corporation to investigate the prospect of going private. A second, two-thirds majority vote by all of the residents (in which anyone who doesn't vote would be counted as a "no" vote) would be needed to actually leave Mitchell-Lama.
Affordable housing advocates say that because the city has so few apartments that lower and middle class New Yorkers can afford, and is rapidly losing those that do exist, Co-op City's 15,000 homes going private would be a disaster. "Co-Op City should remain affordable not only for people that live in it now, but in the future," said McKee, who added that those who are in favor of privatizing simply "want to profiteer" from the sale of an apartment that they bought at a subsidized rate.
For now, Co-op City has ruled out privatization, but not because the debate is finished: The complex is so strapped for money that it cannot pay to study the pros and cons of leaving Mitchell-Lama.
* * *
• CasalsK's Co-op City Page
• David Chessler’s Co-op City Page
• Mitchell Lama Developments With Open Waiting Lists (in pdf format)
• Mitchell Lama Residents Coalition
• New York City's Mitchell Lama Page
• Riverbay Corporation
Just a few blocks up from what was Edgar Allen Poe's cottage in the north Bronx, people are living in a nightmare that might be worthy of one of his tales. And the city's efforts to end it, according to the tenants, are basically useless.
The nightmare is 2874 Grand Concourse, one of the majestic buildings that line the Grand Concourse - majestic at least from the outside.
For almost a year, tenants have been dodging plaster falling from their ceilings and rats in the hallways. They have pleaded with the city to force the landlord to clean up mold, fix a door that allows free access to the roof and replace an antiquated electrical system that leaves many in the dark almost every day. They have caught prostitutes and drug dealers in their hallways conducting business.
City housing inspectors have slapped almost 350 violations on the building. But that has done little to actually get the building repaired - even for the about 80 violations deemed "immediately hazardous" and that theoretically should be corrected with 24 hours.
"They're just coming but nothing's done," said Judith Freeman, the tenant's association president at 2874 Grand Concourse. "There are no results - nothing happens."
Freeman and her neighbors are not the only tenants in the city complaining about passive code enforcement. A new report (In PDF format) by the Association for Neighborhood Housing and Development, co-sponsored by the city's Public Advocate's office, concludes that in the areas that need it most, code enforcement involves little more than writing notes to landlords to please fix their buildings.
The report, released this month and coinciding with hearings on a City Council bill to alter city housing inspections, indicates that people in certain parts of the city are living in dilapidated buildings that are actually getting worse.
The worst housing conditions are in low-income and minority neighborhoods in the South Bronx, Central Brooklyn and Upper Manhattan. The housing code is simply not being enforced strictly where it's needed most, the report concluded.
Astrid Andre, policy director at the Association for Neighborhood Housing and Development and author of the report, said the group had undertaken its report because the organizations making up its membership had different impressions of housing conditions in their areas than officials at the city's housing department. Despite an overall improvement, housing in some areas has not gotten better and, in fact, has gotten worse.
"Our members were telling us there was a stagnation, a deterioration," Andre said. "We just documented what our members were telling us."
The agency that inspects housing in the city, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, downplayed the report.
"Between 1996 and 1999, in the majority of the low income neighborhoods, the numbers were trending in the right direction," said Carol Abrams, assistant commissioner for communications at the department. But when pressed to explain one of the report's findings - an almost 14 percent increase in code violations issued by the agency in the Bronx between 1999 and 2002 - Abrams said she had "no idea."
"There will always be fluctuations," she said. "It's a tenant-driven complaint system."
Overall, Abrams said, the U.S. Census Bureau's Housing Vacancy Survey, conducted every three years, showed the city's housing stock was improving. "The dilapidation rate in 2002 was the lowest than at any other point in the history of the survey," she said.
City Councilmember Joel Rivera, who represents the area where 2874 Grand Concourse sits, said it is unfortunately a building like many others in the Bronx.
"In my district alone, there are a ton of buildings that are in trouble," said Rivera "You don't have to be an inspector to see certain problems.
"The problem in the Bronx is that we have only six full-time inspectors for the entire borough," Rivera said. "The follow-up is not very good because we have so many buildings."
Adding housing inspectors is just one of several recommendations in the new report. Tenants and advocates would also like to see the city housing department impose and collect fines more readily, more aggressively pursue problem landlords and empower tenants by allowing them to petition the department for roof-to-cellar inspections.
Under its current approach, housing inspectors only respond to tenant complaints to its hotline - almost 400,000 annually. But they often walk by glaring problems like broken windows or unlocked front doors because no one complained about them, advocates said.
City Council's new legislation would change that. Intro 400A, as it is called, would allow tenants to petition the city housing department for comprehensive building inspections. The department ought to do such inspections on a cyclical basis in neighborhoods where buildings are dilapidated, the report recommended.
Abrams insisted that the city deploys inspectors in the most efficient fashion, but she declined to respond to questions about that system, instead referring a reporter to the recent testimony of city officials at the City Council public hearing on Intro 400A. The officials said changing the law would not improve things at all.
In their testimony, officials were short on details. They said that inspectors respond to individual complaints and then, through follow up, the complaints are evaluated and analyzed to develop "comprehensive" plans to resolve repair problems.
But Rivera said the department's approach has to change.
"From what I've seen in my own community, the current system does not work," he said. "It's really not the fault of (the city housing department). The administration must invest more in (the city housing department)."
As for the nightmare on the Grand Concourse, its end seems to be approaching, but only after its tenants organized, hauled the landlord into court - and got Councilmember Rivera, their representative, and Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum to visit the building with an entourage of reporters in tow.
Their months of complaints to the city housing department had only led to a $500 fine of the landlord for heat and hot water problems, despite periods as long as a week last winter without any heat or hot water. A Housing Court case for repairs is ongoing and Freeman, the tenant's association president, said she is hoping that the building is taken over by an independent administrator who will apply rents to making repairs. The landlord, Moshe Pillar, could not be reached for comment.
"I really think the only reason they are coming back to follow up now is because" Rivera and the public advocate got involved, Freeman said. "We got the $500 fine, but think of all the months we've got to go."
Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations.
In a city notorious for unscrupulous landlords and the unchecked power of corporations, there is one group that easily inspires the most angry whispering among the heads of many community organizations -- philanthropic foundations.
Tales are told and told again about program officers who don't understand the work they fund; about community groups being made to dance on strings by their foundation patrons; about the capricious way that foundations dole out grants, particularly to small organizations.
For years critics of foundation practices have argued that because foundation dollars are tax-sheltered monies, much of which would otherwise be sitting in the US Treasury, the public has a right to exercise greater control over foundation grant making. Indeed, members of Congress are attempting to increase the amount that foundations are legally mandated to give away every year, though their efforts are meeting resistance. And groups like the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, which was created in 1976, promote "public accountability and transparencies among foundations".
But putting aside the issue of right or wrong, some have long recognized that foundations would simply be more effective in their grant making - whether it be an effort to create more jobs, build more housing, improve public education or strengthen families - if they were more sensitive to the day-to-day realities of the groups and neighborhoods they fund.
In his book American Foundations, which calls for a "foundation anti-trust act" that would break up mega-foundations and make the rest more democratic, Mark Dowie cites a recommendation made way back in 1913 by Jerome Greene. who was later to become secretary of the Rockefeller Foundation. Although he was apparently ignored at the time, Greene proposed the forming of a "public council" to run foundations, as opposed to the "patrician boards that ran foundations at the time", Dowie writes.
Almost a century after Greene proposed a more democratic way of running foundations, most foundations are still highly cloistered, self-perpetuating, elite institutions that seem to answer to no one but themselves. Most foundations function as the vision of one rich white man or family. Peter Goldmark, the former president of Rockefeller said that a typical foundation usually tries to "change some aspect of the larger society in accordance with a view held only by a minority or even a single person. Its job is not to reflect, protect or govern according to a majority."
But with the government's role in areas like housing production, small business improvement and social programs waning in New York, the collective power and influence that foundations play in shaping organized responses to poverty and issues of social justice, will only increase. So, which one of us is going to tell the emperor when he walks down the street that his butt is hanging out? With so much at stake, is it possible for community development organizations to have a truly honest exchange with the hand that feeds them without that hand feeling bitten?
RELATIONSHIP FULL OF IRONIES
To be fair, I have yet to find a way to build social justice institutions using a for-profit or individual donor model. The non-profit organizations with which I have been affiliated over the past 15 years have been sustained by foundations, beneficiaries of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of foundation grants. It would be hard to ignore the incredible social good that foundations generate in New York and the world.
But it's also hard to ignore some of the ironies of fundraising in a community development environment. For instance, many foundations, when setting their funding criteria, will place premium value on things like democratic structures, organizational accountability and collaborations with other organizations, without ever observing those practices within their own institutions. My favorites are the foundations who patronizingly dictate that grantees maintain "involuntarily poor people" on their board, while themselves maintaining institutions with little if any input from low-income people.
In just one textbook example of how community change foundations often don't want to live in the world they themselves promote, two years ago a prominent national foundation that sponsors confrontational, direct-action organizing in New York and abroad once punished organizations by withholding hundreds of thousands in grant dollars. Why? Because the organizations had the temerity to target the foundation itself in a welfare reform protest. John Ashcroft couldn't have issued a more chilling gag order.
Foundations move at their own schedules and idiosyncratic discretion and are notorious for shifting leaders and development strategies like pieces on a chess board. They routinely generate fads in community development practice and anoint those they consider to be the rising stars while unilaterally dictating to neighborhoods and organizations what models of development should be pursued. Another neat trick is when foundations do the exact opposite - sit on the sidelines for 12 or 18 months, not making any new grants because they are "rethinking" their funding criteria, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the world is still spinning.
The result is that grassroots organizations, especially those without government contracts or the capacity to sustain non-grant fundraising campaigns, are constantly kept anxiety-stricken, off balance and insecure. They function in a year round game of financial hide-and-seek, rarely able to conduct long-term planning with confidence.
The most fundamental irony of all is the notion that foundations involved in community development purport to support campaigns and efforts that help people level the socio-economic playing field and exert more control over their lives. And yet it is precisely the disparity of power between foundations and the organizations they fund, and the lack of control that organizations exert, that is so dispiriting to community builders.
One of the greatest threats to community development work is the indulgence of our own propaganda. In my experience, most foundations involved in community building would rather live in a bubble and believe all the blurbs about their grantees that they put in their annual reports or their press clippings, than accept the fact that community development is a protracted, three steps forward, four steps backward, grind being done with the ground shifting beneath your feet.
A DIFFERENT APPROACH
Despite the reasoned arguments of philanthropy reformists like Dowie, foundations are not likely to voluntarily give up power or make themselves more accountable to grassroots voices.
Bob Brothwell, the president emeritus of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and a pioneering veteran of the foundation accountability debate, insists that "calls for accountability always go nowhere". Instead Brothwell, who in 2000 conducted a study of foundation funding of grassroots organizations maintains that we should "talk about what really works, building relationships between foundations and organizations, relationships that are inclined to support" community organizations. Brothwell described to me the elements of successful "partnerships" between foundations and organization that he discovered in his study: Intimate, two-way, committed investments of time, communication and resources that inherently include a modest degree of power sharing by the foundation.
What stands out above all else in Brothwell's model partnership, is a framework for an on-going working dialogue between a foundation and an organization, an exchange in which the foundation is more committed to the long-term success of the organization than what the organization is able to achieve over a given year. This kind of relationship entails patient, multi-year, institution-strengthening, grant making - not a year-to-year, Pavlovian reward.
This kind of partnership means making grants to the entire organization, not just individual programs. It means frequent conversations where organizations are free to discuss their vulnerabilities and the details of their challenges, without fear that their words will be used against them. It means site visits and interactions where organizations are not expected to exploitatively showcase their "success story" members like show ponies or talking monkeys.
Its a relationship committed to sustaining a stable environment in which community development practitioners can spend more time serving their constituents than reading the funding tea leaves or figuring out where the nut is buried in the next funding shell game. I will even go as far as suggesting that it means letting organizations and local players set funding priorities that fit their communities.
I have certainly worked with a handful of program officers and foundations who maintain exemplary, responsive relationships with their grantees. The most progressive and conscientious foundations even have decision-making advisory committees made up almost entirely of grantees, community leaders and the like. But we all could stand to be shaken out of our complacency and trade places with one another. I would challenge any foundation official, even those who come from the community development and activist ranks, to spend a month in the trenches juggling the demands of a grassroots community development organization. By the same token, self-righteous, know-it-alls like me and other community development professionals should spend some time in the shoes of a typical foundation official to understand how difficult it is to meet the pressures of a foundation mission while sifting through hundreds of applications and trying to responsibly manage relationships with community development organizations.
Maybe we can't expect a wholesale change in the way foundations treat community organizations, but perhaps a few brave, philanthropic leaders could publicly model and promote a new kind of relationship between foundations and community organizations. Of course this would be a long-term process that would require independent monitoring, evaluation and an aggressive advocacy campaign to trumpet the results. All the project needs is a foundation to fund it.
Mark Winston Griffith, a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Essence and Spin, is also founder of the non-profit Central Brooklyn Partnership, which organizes people to build economic power.